--On Thursday, 21 December, 2000 14:40 -0800 Melinda Shore
<mshore(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:
Nevertheless, I was *really* irked to be packed into
the back of the room during OPES BOF and to see
people seated in chairs engrossed in various computer
games. I'd say that if you see someone sitting in
a seat you'd like to have and they're playing games,
you should feel free to ask them for their seat.
I tend to agree, and note that game-playing (unlike some other
non-IETF-useful behavior like portfolio-checking) doesn't
require wireless access. Perhaps one thing we should do is to
make it more clear that, if one is a lurker who comes into a WG
meeting on the theory that it might be interesting, and then it
turns out not to be, there is value and no disgrace in walking
out (and we should keep the aisles sufficiently clear to
facilitate that).
On the other hand, there is probably an interaction between
"presentations" and in-meeting personal activities that are not
WG-constructive (game-playing being only an extreme point). I
hope this isn't giving away any dirty little secrets, but, given
a slow-moving marketing-oriented presentation of material that
has already been discussed in I-Ds and on mailing lists, some
people will react by starting to scan email while waiting for
something useful to happen. And many of those people will
distinctly not be newcomers or quiet lurkers. I'm guilty of it,
and assume others are too. But this is another reason to cut
down on (or dramatically shorten, or tightly focus) the
presentations, not to attack tools such as wireless: I'm
perfectly capable of scanning mail during a useless and boring
presentation while not connected, it is just less efficient.
Incidentally, looking at tools and superficial behavior, rather
than causes, is one of the problems with token systems as well.
I quite often finding myself trying to cover more than one WG
that is meeting at the same time, and we've sometimes
deliberately scheduled IAB members to cover more than one
concurrent BOF. Schedule conflicts are inevitable unless we
figure out how to cut the workload, and these things become
necessary. Given ability to get into the room, multiple
coverage isn't a problem as long as the S/N ratio is low (or the
signal level is low, independent of noise).
However, the fact that we can cover two groups in one time slot
without missing anything is, again, a symptom. I won't walk out
(or tune out) on a WG that is discussing issues of substance in
ways that didn't come up on, or couldn't be effectively
discussed in, a WG mailing list or in I-Ds. But redundant
presentations make the WG meeting more attractive to those who
haven't "done their homework". In some sense, this suggests
that low-content or repetitive-of-documents presentations
_cause_ lurking and game-playing in the rooms. And that WG
Chairs need to control those much more aggressively.
john